UC Online efforts profiled in SF Chronicle

UC Online efforts profiled in SF Chronicle - ouch!

It's tough to compete with free -- that's one of the points of "UC online courses fail to lure outsiders," by Nanette Asimov in the January 8th San Francisco Chronicle. The appeal of UC credits is apparently not enough to overcome the relatively high prices of $1400 to $2400 per course, particularly when compared with free MOOCs which don't offer credit. After a year, only one student from outside the UC system has enrolled in any of the UC Online course offerings, although 4 more have recently registered.

The one class from UC Online highlighted in the article is from UC Riverside:

In a demonstration of UC Online, Williams powered up Professor Jacqueline Shey-Murphy's online course "Dance Cultures and Context," which attracted more than 120 students last quarter at UC Riverside. Shey-Murphy introduced the class on video, with the syllabus and calendar at left. Students joined in "synchronous discussions" - a chat room - each Friday.

Developing interactive courses that meet the UC academic standards and can be offered at a cost savings compared with face-to-face classes is challenging. I think the ability for students to interact with UC faculty has to be the selling point of any UC online effort, but it is also a big part of the challenge. Finding computational or crowdsourced solutions to grading and interaction, as has been done with MOOCs, seems to go against the UC agenda for online classes. On the other hand, large class sizes are where cost savings are most likely to come from and these present the biggest challenge to instructor-student interaction. MOOCs will have to change eventually if they are going to become profitable -- right now the production and overhead costs that are making things difficult for the UC Online effort are not really a concern for MOOCs.

Comments

Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

Change the Text Editor in Moodle

This lesson shows how to choose an alternate text editor in Moodle. Edit profile After you login, click Edit profile under My profile settings in the Administration block. If you have moved the Administration block to the dock on the left edge of your browser, you can choose Edit profile from the menu by moving your mouse over the Administration menu on the left edge of the screen. Text editor The currently selected text editor is shown in your profile in the General section. Change the editor Click on the Text editor menu to choose a different option. The TinyMCE HTML editor was the default editor in versions of Moodle prior to 2.7 and it has a few more options than the new default editor, the Atto HTML editor. The Atto editor works with all browsers while the TinyMCE editor does not work completely with Chrome or Internet Explorer. Update Click Update profile at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

QuickSource Guides to Blackboard

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Search This Blog